Korngold Goes to Nikkatsu was conceived from a wild fever dream combining the work of two of my favorite artists: Erich Wolfgang Korngold and Seijun Suzuki. Korngold was the last great child prodigy in the canon of Western Classical music, writing critically acclaimed and artistically brilliant orchestral works and operas before his 20th birthday. His early fame was recognized by the likes of Puccini, Mahler, and Strauss, and his meteoric rise to stardom caught the attention of directors in Hollywood, where he soon quickly elevated film scoring to an art by treating film music as “opera without words.” His work in the genre of film music created the “Hollywood Sound,” serving as the aesthetic bedrock of the Golden Age of Hollywood’s musical taste. However, his foray into film music left him marked and stigmatized by the concert hall, as he rarely found a welcoming concert review after he stepped on to the Hollywood soundstage. Korngold’s highly (yet also extremely progressive) Romantic aesthetic and orchestrational virtuosity have served as a chief inspiration of mine for years.

The work of Seijun Suzuki is little known outside of his home country of Japan, yet his contributions to the field of cinema are both universal and highly visible. After being shipwrecked twice as a meteorologist in the Japanese Imperial Navy, he failed the entrance exam for the University of Tokyo, but was able to get a job as a second director with Shochiku, and eventually ended up as a B-movie director with Nikkatsu Studios. Nikkatsu’s studio system meant that Suzuki was handed cookie-cutter plots of gangster films, and rarely had a hand in casting his actors. However, with the forty films he churned out under Nikkatsu from 1956 to 1967, he slowly but surely began to push the envelope. He began destroying notions of narrative, eliminating all instances of exposition in his films, inserting aesthetic devices that destroyed the realism of the film and turned his hard-boiled gangster flicks into arthouse specials and cult phenomena. His absurdism and abstract nature reached something of a peak in his last film with Nikkatsu, Branded to Kill (1967). The film was quickly deemed incomprehensible by Suzuki’s bosses after release, and he was unceremoniously fired, with all copies of the film being withdrawn by the studio. However, the film had already made its mark: student-led demonstrations and a lawsuit by Suzuki eventually allowed the film to see the light of day, yet much like Korngold, Suzuki was effectively blackballed by the studios of Japan for decades afterward.

Suzuki’s style is reflective of many different styles of film from the time. You can see the archetypes of American Westerns á la John Wayne rubbing elbows with the classical morals of Kurosawa and Ozu coupled with Besson and Godard’s French New Wave. Suzuki then throws in gratuitous amounts of violence and sex with an extreme dose of nihilism, annihilating any semblance of a plot with his beautiful aesthetic decisions – at one point in his film Kanto Wanderer (1963), the main character is shocked when he unsheathes his sword and the walls around him fall away to reveal a stark blood-red background – in Tokyo Drifter (1967), the nightclub in which the final firefight takes place slowly disintegrates as the movie progresses. His anarchistic style and stunning cinematography has influenced scores of directors, such as Jim Jarmusch and Quentin Tarantino. The main inspiration of Korngold Goes to Nikkatsu is in imagining a film of Suzuki’s scored by Korngold. Both of these artists worked in aesthetics of excess – Korngold with his hyper-Romanticism, and Suzuki with his seemingly never-ending action sequences and hyper-masculine (to the point of parody) heroes. The piece is loosely based off of the form of the Golden Age of Hollywood’s film score suites, whose structure is constantly attacked by Suzuki-esque logical subversions.